


Almost Home (Where the Mile Continues)

by alicekittridge



Category: The Haunting of Bly Manor (TV)
Genre: F/F, Feelings, Lots of them this time, Mild Angst, POV Third Person, Present Tense, Strong sexual content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-06
Updated: 2021-01-06
Packaged: 2021-03-16 19:54:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28587546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alicekittridge/pseuds/alicekittridge
Summary: Home, for Dani, had been a place that was always left behind.ORDani and Jamie, a little before Vermont.
Relationships: Dani Clayton/Jamie
Comments: 4
Kudos: 101





	Almost Home (Where the Mile Continues)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sigmalied](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sigmalied/gifts).



> with admiration and thanks
> 
> \--  
> I began this on New Year's Eve after two screwdrivers, and a few days later, this is the result. I'm quite proud of it, as it's the longest work I've been able to write in a long while. I hope you all like it, and thank you, as always, for reading xx

**N** ew York is loud. Loud, like London had been, but in a distinctly American way. Honking horns and less-colorful insults serenade the never-ending hours. The world is changing to winter around them; the trees in Central Park are almost naked, their leaves scattered on browning grass, slowly fading from red and gold. The sun, though brighter due to its closeness, barely warms what it touches. Soon, Dani thinks, drawing her bathrobe tighter around herself, leaning over the tall edge of the balcony to watch the people below, the streets will be covered in snow. People will be bundled up against it. The more she watches the meandering people, the more she can see herself among them, melting into big-city anonymity without much trouble. She likes the idea, that she’ll be a different face to everyone but those that know her. Co-workers, a boss, a waitress at a restaurant that knows her usual order. Jamie. And she likes the liberalness of this city. Likes that she can hold Jamie’s hand a little more without feeling scared. But even with all the above, it doesn’t feel like home. There’s a restlessness that’s demanding to be soothed, but there is no balm to satisfy it. It isn’t her demon—that much she knows. The Lady has calmed since Dani’s departure from Bly, slumbering at last, presence hardly felt. It’s a different sort of restlessness. One neither travel nor various intimacies can soothe. 

Home, for Dani, had been a place that was always left behind. It wasn’t Iowa, with its bitter winters and half-humid summers and oppressive weight of guilt. It wasn’t England, either, despite the family it led to. Both these places are now a stamp on a passport. Evidence that she’d been there, but hadn’t stayed. She wonders, not for the first time, what makes people stay anywhere. What sort of gravity pulls and demands that someone stay rooted. She wonders what hers will tell her, once it’s found. How she’ll know it’s the right kind. The right place.

I’ll know, she thinks, hearing Jamie puttering around behind her, probably searching for more wine. Somehow.

“You cold yet, Poppins?” Jamie says.

“Freezing,” Dani replies. East coast Decembers are hardly ever kind. She turns back to the warmth of the room, of Jamie’s embrace, sighing contentedly at both. She mutters an apology into Jamie’s flannel-covered chest. “Just needed some air.”

“Looked like you were thinkin’.”

She nods.

“What about?” Jamie asks, the lightness in her voice saying, _You don’t have to tell me._

“Home,” Dani says. “How part of it’s missing, in a way.”

Jamie’s hands travel up Dani’s back and into her hair. “Still got another place to taste,” she says. “It’s almost Christmas.”

Dani smiles at the thought. She can picture it so clearly: lights hung everywhere, varying colors dancing off her and Jamie as they walk through fresh snow and soft, floating flakes. Pausing in some bar or other to get warm, smelling of burning wood and dark beer. Opening gifts after telling each other not to get anything. She says, “I know.” She leans her head against Jamie’s shoulder. Shuffles closer to her. “Warm me up?” A suggestion, and an offer.

Jamie hums. There’s a smile tugging at her lips when Dani pulls back to allow her to undo the robe. Dani kisses her as she’s unwrapped. It’s familiar, this dance, and even though they’d fallen into rhythm a while ago, there are still more dances to learn. She pushes back the thought that there may not be time. Tells herself to focus on this one, on Jamie’s eager but gentle mouth trailing down her skin. Her tongue travels lightly between Dani’s breasts.

“Jesus,” Dani breathes. All sense goes flying out the window. She takes Jamie’s hand, kisses her palm, and tugs her in the direction of the queen bed, the covers stiff, smelling of detergent. She sheds the robe in one swift movement, pushing a complying Jamie onto the bed, straddling her lap, thoughts about fairness melting with every kiss. She takes the hand that isn’t buried in her hair and presses it between her thighs.

“Dani,” Jamie whispers, fingers immediately stiffening and going to work, touching lightly at first—always lightly, Dani thinks with a sigh, and not out of hesitation but leaving room for rejection. A pattern begun in a moonlit greenhouse accompanied by too much wine and the heady smell of woodfire smoke. Jamie’s keeping to the pattern is a sweetness that makes Dani’s heart swell inside her chest.

Jamie’s touch only becomes heavier when Dani says her name back to her.

It isn’t desperate, what goes on once they’re joined by Jamie’s hand. Not like other times. Dani chalks it up to the weather and the season, that the only way to get warm is to begin as a spark and set a pace that allows for a slow burn. It’s a nice change. Dani accepts it with every gentle kiss Jamie presses to her skin, every moan and sigh, every thrust of hip that meets Jamie’s hand. Many heavy minutes later, fingers curl, stroking new territory, and Dani cries out, Jamie responding with a millisecond pause and a pleasured sound of her own, focus shifting entirely at Dani’s whimpered, “There, Jamie…”

She clings to Jamie’s shoulders when she comes.

Dani collapses in her lap not long after, held by strong arms, kissed into bliss by soft lips. She sighs against Jamie’s mouth, still trembling, completely aware of Jamie’s frazzled state. Still kissing her, Dani works at the buttons on Jamie’s heavy flannel shirt with clumsy fingers, aware that Jamie might tell her she doesn’t have to, wanting to tell her she wants to. “Relationships are built on fairness,” Dani might joke, Jamie’s response being a breathy laugh and a smile, but fairness is only an inkling of the reason behind these actions. There are larger ones, things Dani cannot say with words—not just yet.

Jamie is wearing nothing underneath the shirt. There’s only soft, milky skin, having turned paler since those warm, sunny weeks in Orlando. Dani trails fingers between Jamie’s breasts, eliciting a shiver, then cups the left one. Jamie’s hand joins hers, forehead meeting Dani’s. Eyes closed.

Jamie murmurs, “I’m glad.”

Glad to be here, it says, with you. Dani can’t say anything back but a firm kiss, during which she presses Jamie gently backwards until they both hit the bed.

Dani kisses from Jamie’s lips to the corner of a jaw, down to an earlobe—where she tugs on the earring in the lobe with her teeth—and across Jamie’s neck, pausing at her pulse to feel its jump. Jamie’s skin smells like the city, and salt, and something uniquely her. Dani could stay bowed over her forever, lost in the homey smell of her. Other things are calling her name.

She moves slowly downward, kissing leisurely across the silky expanse of Jamie’s chest, taking a nipple between her teeth and tugging gently, pausing to caress the underside of a breast with her tongue—an action, Dani has found, that never fails to make Jamie shudder and reach desperately for any part of her that Jamie can reach. Dani repeats it before venturing lower, savoring, but more than that, cherishing.

Dani pauses, undoing Jamie’s jeans, resting her chin on the warm skin just above the waistband. By now, she has learned that Jamie is as thrilled with Dani’s hand between her legs when it’s confined inside jeans as she is when there aren’t any barriers at all, and so she asks quietly, around labored breaths, “Do you want me to…?” And god, Dani thinks, how lovely she looks like this, hair dishevelled, eyes alight, blush coloring her cheeks and chest a pleasant shade of red. Dani expects a quip of some sort, said around a smile, but instead she receives a heavy, breathy reply,

“Want your mouth.”

It settles in her stomach like a sucker-punch. Dani presses a kiss just above the waistband of Jamie’s jeans, and then to the top of the hand that reaches down for hers. The jeans don’t come off all the way; Jamie’s left leg is bare while the right isn’t, but none of it matters once Dani perches herself between parted knees and leans slowly in. She keeps the same pace as before. There is nowhere else to be, unless they counted the boat tours that they had eyed on the cold journey back from seeing the Empire State Building. They’d walked past it, Dani’s gloved hand tucked into the crook of Jamie’s elbow, and Dani eyed the boat and the people therein with a teaspoon of envy; it had looked warm inside, but cruising on the open, greenish water of the Hudson to see the city glisten from a distance was an appealing vision. But, Dani thinks, throwing an arm across Jamie’s hips, there’s always tomorrow. Today, it’s just this warmth, this drawn-out moment, Jamie’s hand clutching hers, the taste of her rich on Dani’s tongue, body curling forward as she falls, cursing, over the edge.

Dani moves back up, pressing her forehead to Jamie’s. She’s fond of the intimacy of afterward, where they breathe together and bask in the glow, where she can press kisses against Jamie’s hair and it isn’t too much.

Eventually Jamie manages, “Warm enough now?”

Dani smiles. “Definitely.” She lays beside Jamie, propping herself on an elbow, taking in her nearly-naked state. “I wouldn’t mind staying here,” she says. “We could order room service.”

The sound Jamie makes is a mix of a laugh and a scoff. “You want a thirty-dollar cheeseburger?”

Dani shrugs one shoulder. “Never had one that expensive before.”

Jamie’s smile is bright. “Guess some of the money is Henry’s for a reason.”

Neither of them moves to fetch the room service menu, or take a bottle of wine from the fridge, too trapped in the cocoon of each other’s presence. Dani trails her fingers over Jamie’s skin, beginning from collarbones, gliding between breasts and ending at hips, then back up again. She asks, “Do you like it here?”

Jamie chews her lip. “Well enough,” she says after a moment. “Could be quieter.”

“You’re stuck on Vermont,” Dani teases.

“What of it?”

Dani shakes her head. She kisses Jamie softly on the corner of her mouth. “Nothing,” Dani whispers. Jamie turns to face her. Her eyes are dark again, reflecting a softness that isn’t shown publicly. She tucks a strand of hair behind Dani’s ear. Kisses her fully.

“Put your hand on me, Dani,” Jamie murmurs.

Dani sighs into the next kiss, hand, once again, slipping south, beginning the second act.

—

The morning sunlight that spills into the room is blinding. Dani squints against it when she sits up in bed, having grown used to the soft grey light from the day before. Through the curtain, she glimpses brilliant blue sky and white steam rising from several buildings. Winter skies are a different hue, she thinks, stretching her arms above her head. One can take a single look at them and know that the day outside the window is bitterly cold. For a moment she’s tempted to stay in bed, let Jamie soothe the soreness of last night’s passion with feathery kisses and tongue, but the city is calling them to wander among its buildings and waterways, and another state is a neon sign glowing at the back of their minds. So Dani rises.

She stumbles naked throughout the room, gathering yesterday’s clothes to stuff them into the dresser, replacing them with clean ones from her suitcase. The bathroom is still humid from Jamie’s shower, an event Dani had been dead to. There’s a note loitering on the counter, written on the standard-issue stationery. _Went to get coffee,_ it says. _See you in a bit._

The coffee, it turns out, is Starbucks. Jamie only bears one cup, which she holds out to Dani in the steamy bathroom.

“You better like it, Poppins,” she says. “Fuckin’ expensive blonde roast ruined with your usual amount of milk and sugar.”

“That’s just an opinion,” Dani says.

“A right one.”

“You didn’t get anything?”

“Shite tea is not how I want to begin a cold day.”

Dani takes a sip of the coffee. It’s strong stuff. Stronger than most of what she’s had on this little trip. She nods her approval and asks around the rim of the cup, “How do you want to begin it?”

The weather isn’t any warmer by the time they make it outside. Cold air bites their faces, pale skin coloring within minutes of exposure. Their breaths join others. The anonymity Dani had craved the night before becomes a reality, for there are no looks garnered their way. To everyone else, she and Jamie are other New Yorkers living in little circles of their own, lives someone they pass might wonder about later, or spare a single thought for and never think it again. Dani wonders if this feeling might come to light elsewhere, and if it would last, or if she and Jamie would eventually tire of it and long to be more than just a face in a crowd.

Breakfast is bagels eaten in a crowded shop, a mix of accents and languages bouncing off white walls. Afterward, full and warm, they return to the cold, weaving their way through the grid until, at last, they arrive at 42nd Street. It lies on a curve of the Hudson. The water reflects the blue sky and the clouds floating in it, the bridges and the buildings, and the massive hulk of the tour boat. Just before it is a spinach green hut—Dani can think of no other word for it—where tickets can be purchased. Today’s tour times are posted on a large white board in bold lettering.

“Ten dollars,” Jamie mutters, forking the cash over to the attendant at the counter, “for a bloody dirty boat tour.” Yet the complaint dies as soon as they’re on board in the warmth of downstairs—the boat has two decks, one up top and out in the open, the other down below—and they can see the city on both sides of the large windows. Toward the back is a bar where people can buy drinks. Noticing Dani’s lingering gaze, Jamie says, “Want one?”

“Hot cocoa, please,” Dani replies.

“Anythin’ in it?”

“I’ll sing your praises forever if you slip some Bailey’s in.”

“Right-o,” Jamie says with a wink, turning into the line. Dani thinks of other winks thrown her direction, most of which occurred at Bly after the first night they’d fallen clumsily into Dani’s bed and happened over lunches and dinners. Always a gesture that happened when Miles and Flora weren’t looking and when Jamie thought Owen and Hannah’s attention was elsewhere. The winks were quick, but the smile that accompanied them stayed glued to Jamie’s lips. There had been a smile with this one, too, bearing relics of that table that feels a lifetime away [?]. And like those early days, Dani is compelled to look, eyes falling on a Jamie who is highlighted by both bright sunlight and dimmer, golden light from the boat, carrying two white cups in gloved hands and weaving through a mass of wintry-clothed bodies, but unlike then, Dani’s heart gives a different sort of lurch. Nothing unpleasant, mind you; just the opposite. A feeling that doesn’t yet have a name, but soon might.

Jamie sits beside her with a sigh, handing over one cup with a, “Hot cocoa with medicine, as requested.” A phrase she’d use with Miles when he’d try to peek at the summer cocktails she and Owen made, as in, “Oi, shove off. It’s got medicine in it.”

There’s even whipped cream and peppermint on top. Dani hums after the first hot sip has gone down. “Thank you.”

“Sure thing.”

“What’d you get?”

“Spiced wine.” Jamie takes her gloves off, shoves them into a coat pocket. She procures a cigarette and lighter from the other, sticking the first between her lips. The lighter is stubborn. It sparks the first few times, tries to light, dies again. “G’dammit,” Jamie mumbles around the cigarette. Tries again and flinches, having burned her thumb. “Fuck.”

“Let me,” Dani says, taking the thing from her. It lights on the first click.

Jamie scoffs. “Likes you well enough.”

“Maybe you’ve cursed at it too many times.” The end smolders as the flame licks it. Jamie takes one long drag once Dani pulls the lighter away, exhaling the smoke away from them. She holds her thumb up for inspection. The pad of it is pink, the shape of it like the lighter’s flame. Dani takes that hand without thinking, bringing Jamie’s thumb to her lips, kissing it. Jamie’s face is a mask of surprise, but more than that, Dani knows they’re thinking the same thing. How, just before breakfast, Dani had taken Jamie’s hand from between trembling thighs and kissed her fingers clean. How they’d both like it if she were to part her lips and allow Jamie to trace her tongue. The action doesn’t last more than a few seconds. The thoughts that flow between them last eons.

Jamie pulls her hand away and wets her lips with spiced wine. Dani hears her clear her throat. Then she says, “Blimey.”

“Thinking of jumping ship?”

“And tuggin’ you along with me.”

Dani smiles. The boat’s engine roars to life, vibrating the floor. “No complaints here,” she says. “You always like getting me out of my clothes.”

“Would be a good excuse,” Jamie agrees. “Although we’d stink like hell after bein’ in this shite water.”

They’d feel like wildlife after they’ve been rescued from an oil spill.

The boat pulls away from the shore. A cheery man comes over the loudspeakers. _“Goood morning. Hope you’re staying warm. It’s a balmy nineteen Fahrenheit with a five mile-per-hour wind, but if you’re one of the brave ones above deck, it might feel a little balmier._

_“Now, we’ll be cruising around at a steady thirty miles-per-hour along the Hudson. The tour itself won’t take more than an hour and a half, so sit back, grab a drink, and enjoy this different perspective of Manhattan.”_

As the scenes beyond the windows change, Dani takes several pictures with a disposable camera. Photographer she is not, by any standard; some of the pictures from previous trips that’d been developed were abysmal, and when she commented on a blurry shot of Jamie on Saint Pete’s Beach making a sour face at the piles of stinking seaweed, “It looks like a five-year-old took it,” Jamie had said, “It’s still charming, Poppins,” and punctuated the statement with a warm kiss to Dani’s cheek. Jamie’s photos, on the other hand, always look like they’re taken by someone with promising talent that will blossom into a career. (Dani has kept several of these tucked in an envelope inside her bag, each one carefully labelled on the back.)

The boat glides onto open waters. Skyscrapers get smaller as the boat approaches the Statue of Liberty. She and Jamie lean into the window to their left, taking in its immense base, the swathed people like ants gathering around a morsel.

“We should see it tomorrow,” Dani says, talking over the voice from the loudspeakers.

“All right,” says Jamie, in a tone that means _I’m game if you are._ “Think it’s supposed to be warmer tomorrow, anyways.”

“It won’t make much difference,” Dani says, sitting back down, close enough that her shoulder brushes Jamie’s. “I’ll still turn into an ice cube.”

“If that happens,” Jamie takes a last drag on her cigarette before digging a coin from her pants pocket to grind it out on, “you can trust me to melt you.”

You already do, Dani wants to say, but settles for an amused and contented smile.

—

They see the Statue of Liberty. The day is much like the one before in terms of weather, the skies blue, the sun bright. They take turns taking each other’s pictures, posing like many tourists do, postures silly: Dani balancing delicately on one foot so that the statue looks as if it’s a toy she’s about to step on; Jamie sticking a cigarette between her lips and leaning until the fire of Lady Liberty’s torch touches the end of it. A man from Taiwan takes their picture, the distance between them telling, to the untrained eye, of friendship. They thank him and take his family’s picture in return.

It’s the sixth day in New York. Manhattan is a big city with so much to do clustered inside it. The list is as long as Dani’s arm. She’s staring outside the window of their taxi, watching the bright Times Square float by, listening as Jamie suggests they see a musical. “ _Cats,_ ” she’s saying, “or _Phantom of the Opera._ ” Dani imagines the clustered warmth, the cushioned seats, the dark of the auditorium where no one would notice if she held Jamie’s hand, or allowed her fingers to walk over a thigh. She imagines and it feels restless. Not the Lady’s doing; she seems to have slumbered through this whole interlude. It’s stifling.

Dani turns to Jamie and says, “Maybe we could save it for next time. Get some lunch instead.”

Jamie’s bright eyes rove over her, tinged with concern. “All right,” she says. Then, to the cabbie, “Oi, know anywhere we can get a sandwich? A _good_ one?”

“Can’t beat Katz’s,” the cabbie replies in a thick Brooklyn accent. “They got a pastrami on rye as big as my head.”

Dani meets Jamie’s gaze.

“Sold,” Jamie says. “Thanks, mate. Take us there, please?”

“You got it.”

Dani tips him extra.

Jamie whistles when they’re outside of the place. “It’s ancient,” she says. “By American standards, I mean.”

Dani smiles. She tugs on Jamie’s arm, stomach already growling at the scent of cooking meat wafting through the doors. “England has no idea what a pastrami on rye is.”

“Sure we do.”

Later, once they’re seated at the back and the sandwiches are set in front of them, Jamie takes a greedy bite and says around it, “Never understood why your portions are so bloody large.”

“Big egos?” Dani suggests, Jamie’s laughter like music.

“Different culture.”

“We like leftovers here.”

“What makes you think we don’t?”

“English portions are a quarter of this size. And you have a small meal between lunch and dinner. We only have one between breakfast and lunch.”

“Must’ve been invented for people who can never decide between the two.”

“Maybe so,” Dani says. Sometimes she misses afternoon tea. The ritual of it all. The companionable quietness. How Jamie and Hannah could make the best tea Dani ever tasted.

They don’t finish the sandwich. There’s about a third of it lingering on the plate. Jamie’s leaning back in her chair, looking like she might soon roll out of it and collapse, napping, onto the sawdust-covered floor. Dani feels similarly, smiling to herself that the nice cabbie had been right. It _was_ as big as his head. Still, once minutes have passed and she’s downed a good portion of iced tea, Dani asks, “Do you want some cheesecake?”

Jamie mock-groans. “You tryin’ to kill me?”

“Come on. Cheesecake in New York. You’ll never have another like it.”

Jamie holds her hands up, conceding. “Fine. But one wee bite.”

Dani ogles the dessert case for longer than she means to, torn between a slice of cheesecake with blueberries and a slice of carrot cake with perfect dollops of icing adorning it. She chooses the cheesecake and watches Jamie take her promised one bite, lips stained purple with blueberry juice.

They taste like that too, when Dani has her pressed against the door to their hotel room. Like that and cigarettes.

“Couldn’t wait, huh?” Jamie says between breaths, smirking.

“Do you mind?”

“Not at all, Poppins.”

“I think you’re right about this place,” Dani says an hour later, spread out on the bed, Jamie’s mouth kissing down bare skin for the third time. There’s a charm about it, in a big-city way, and Dani has liked everything New York’s elicited, but it’s like she realized two nights ago. It isn’t home.

Jamie’s lips pause at her hip. Warm breath coasts over it when she asks, “When do you want to leave?”

“Tomorrow?” Dani says. “For Vermont, if…” Jamie’s mouth is moving lower, “…that’s okay with you…” She reaches down, cradling the back of Jamie’s head in her hand.

“More than okay,” Jamie says, and leans in to begin again.

**Author's Note:**

> I would also like to dedicate this to Carol, my very encouraging beta-reader, and the light of my days
> 
> \--  
> Songs I listened to while writing this: "Without Your Love" and "Nobody's Lonely Tonight" by Chris Stapleton; and "99 Luftballons" by Kaleida


End file.
